The ma­jor­ity do so to sus­tain them­selves, ac­cord­ing to the re­cently com­pleted fifth Malaysian Pop­u­la­tion and Fam­ily Sur­vey.

“Want­ing to re­main ac­tive, re­fus­ing to de­pend on oth­ers, pay­ing off loans and not hav­ing any­one to rely on are also why se­niors con­tinue to work,” she said.

Con­ducted ev­ery 10 years to mon­i­tor pop­u­la­tion and fam­ily sys­tem changes, the sur­vey cov­ers more than 10,000 house­holds.

“A to­tal of 69 per­cent of work­ing se­niors sur­veyed said they need the money for daily ex­penses. Only 11.6 per­cent said they work to keep them­selves oc­cu­pied,” she said.

Ro­hani was re­spond­ing to Sun­day Star’s July 26 front-page re­port on how poor re­tire­ment sav­ings and low fi­nan­cial lit­er­acy faced by a soar­ing pop­u­la­tion of se­niors are among the rea­sons why Malaysia is not pre­pared to be­come an ag­ing na­tion.

She said 42 per­cent of se­niors had zero sav­ings.

“Al­most 85 per­cent of those with­out sav­ings say they didn’t have enough money to save (when they were younger) but 3.5 per­cent said it never oc­curred to them to do so,” Ro­hani said, adding that 16 per­cent of se­niors did not save be­cause they thought they could de­pend on their chil­dren.

The good news is that most se­niors are re­ceiv­ing strong sup­port from their fam­i­lies.